A thirteen-matra line in a garbi
You are preparing a school edition of a 19th-century Swaminarayan garbi. The poem's stanza pattern is four lines, each normally scanning as twelve matras; the tune is fixed and is still sung in a temple in Bhavnagar. In stanza 5 the fourth line scans as thirteen matras on any natural reading: a long vowel falls where the parallel stanzas have a short one ('rāj' against 'raj'). A colleague proposes deleting the word 'aj' to restore twelve. The oldest manuscript (1846) reads 'aj rāj'; a later manuscript (1871) reads 'rāj' alone. The 1871 manuscript is otherwise careless, with several dropped case markers. A singer you consult says she 'stretches' the line when singing and does not experience it as defective.
1. Is the thirteen-matra line a scribal corruption, a licensed metrical variation, or evidence of a different chhand? Set out how you would decide.
Read the worked answer
I would separate three hypotheses before choosing:
- Corruption. Supported only by the 1871 witness, which is demonstrably careless. Deletion is the easiest scribal operation (haplography or metrical tidying), so a shorter later reading is suspect, not privileged. The 1846 reading has the longer form, and lectio brevior is not a rule in prosody.
- Licensed variation. Gujarati jāti-based chhand count matras, and the tradition allows a singer or poet a 'stretched' matra at a line-end or before a caesura, often resolved in performance by a quickening of the following syllables. One extra matra in one line of a long poem, with the tune accommodating it, is well within that licence.
- Different chhand. Unlikely here: a different chhand would show a repeated pattern across a whole stanza, not a single anomaly in stanza 5 while stanzas 1-4 and 6 scan uniformly.
Decisive test: check whether the anomaly falls at a position where the tradition regularly permits a stretch, and whether the tune marks a caesura there. If both hold, hypothesis two wins. The strongest single argument against emendation is that a living singer does not perceive a defect.
2. State an editorial policy for printing the line, and justify it in terms of the edition's users.
Read the worked answer
Policy: print the 1846 reading ('aj rāj') in the text; do not emend; add a metrical note recording the thirteen-matra scansion, the 1871 variant, and the singer's practice of stretching. Do not bracket the word as a supplement.
Justification:
- Against the 1871 reading: a school edition that silently follows the worst witness teaches pupils a false stemma. The 1871 scribe drops case markers elsewhere; his shorter line is more plausibly his own tidying than the poet's original.
- Against emendation: emending on metrical grounds alone would make the editor a co-author. The metrical licence is documented by performance, which is independent evidence, not a convenience.
- For the edition's users: school pupils need to see that metre is a convention with permitted variation, and that editors make judgements they must declare. A footnote doing this is pedagogically more valuable than a text that scans perfectly because it has been repaired.
If the edition's house style forbids notes, the alternative is to print the reading and add a short preface paragraph on metrical licence; silent correction is the one option to reject.